A family of loyal martyrs, starting with nine wives to continue the family line.

The calm at Quanzhou Port lasted for less than three days.

For the past three days, Shang Wanqing seemed to have grown up in the dock. She moved directly into the workshop filled with blueprints and timber, and ate and slept there.

She examined the layer of fish oil resin scraped off the pirate ship more than a dozen times.

Boil, dry, adjust different proportions, and if you fail, start over.

The entire dock was filled with a pungent smell of fish and burning tree sap, making people feel dizzy and nauseous.

The experienced workers who followed her were driven to despair by her, but no one dared to utter a word.

On the afternoon of the third day, when she finally formulated a substitute with a viscosity and toughness almost identical to the original, she immediately ordered her men to tow the sixteenth fast ship, which had just been launched and had not yet undergone final debugging, back to the dry dock.

"Paint it on."

She pointed to the bucket of dark brown paint that emitted a strange smell and said to the several dumbfounded shipwrights:

"From bow to stern, not an inch can be missed. Scrub it three times."

No one dared to ask why.

When the speedboat, entirely black with a greasy, dark sheen on its hull, glided back into the sea the following morning, everyone felt that the boat looked somewhat different.

The sea trial took only one hour.

When they returned, as soon as the boat docked, dozens of boatmen surrounded them, bombarding them with questions.

"Madam Shang, how is it?"

"Does this thing even work?"

Shang Wanqing jumped off the boat, her face expressionless. She simply wiped her face, which was chilled by the sea breeze, and looked at the new boat quietly resting on the water. She only said one sentence.

"Pass down the order: the remaining two ships, and all future new ships, will use this hull."

She paused, then added a sentence, her voice not loud, but enough to silence the entire dock.

"It's almost 30% faster than the previous one."

……

Meanwhile, in the heavily guarded temporary camp behind Quanzhou Port, another war without gunfire was also coming to an end.

Liu Jingshuang dispersed all three hundred-plus prisoners she had captured and interrogated them separately.

She didn't use torture; she simply had the pirates starved for two days, then interrogated them separately, asking them the same questions.

How many people did Ke Zhenchuan have? Where were the boats hidden? Where did the provisions come from?

Most of the prisoners were coastal refugees who had been coerced into joining the movement, and they knew nothing about the situation.

But there are always tough guys, and there are always those who know the inside story.

In a tent that served as a makeshift interrogation room, a one-eyed pirate, whose eyes were sunken and lips were cracked from hunger, was pinned to the ground by two soldiers.

He looked at the female general before him, dressed in plain clothes, her expression colder than the seawater outside the tent, with a hint of arrogance in her eyes.

I advise you to tell them.

Liu Jingshuang's voice was calm. She was toying with a narrow-bladed longsword she had captured, its blade gleaming coldly in the lamplight.

"Tell me, and you'll have a full meal. Don't tell me, and I'll throw you back into the sea to feed the fish. I don't have time to waste with you."

The one-eyed pirate remained silent for a long time before finally speaking in a hoarse voice, "I said, can you spare my life?"

"cannot."

Liu Jingshuang answered crisply, "But it will make your death quicker."

The last trace of color drained from the one-eyed pirate's face. He knew that the woman before him wasn't trying to scare him.

Half an hour later, a statement written by Liu Jingshuang herself was delivered to Shang Wanqing's dock.

Shang Wanqing was directing the craftsmen to lay the keel of the seventeenth ship when she took the paper, still stained with ink, glanced at it, and stopped what she was doing.

The statement was short, but every word on it felt like a stone, making it hard to breathe.

That one-eyed pirate was an old man who had followed Ke Zhenchuan from the previous dynasty's navy, and he knew far more than ordinary pirates.

"Ke Zhenchuan occupies three large islands that are mutually supportive, south of the Qiongzhou Strait. He has not only built simple docks and granaries on the islands, but also reclaimed wasteland and planted crops."

"He has been recruiting refugees from Southeast Asia and coastal areas, promising them plenty of food and resettlement allowances. The number of people on the island now is much greater than what you see at sea. Less than half of them came out on the ship this time. There are at least 13,000 to 14,000 people who have stayed on the island."

Thirteen or fourteen thousand people.

This number made Shang Wanqing's breath catch in her throat for a moment.

This means that Ke Zhenchuan's total troop strength exceeded 20,000.

At this size, they are no longer pirates; they are a separatist force entrenched in the South China Sea.

Liu Jingshuang enclosed a sentence with the letter, written in her own handwriting; the handwriting, like her personality, was calm and sharp.

"Your Clippers aren't enough. They have too many players."

Shang Wanqing stared at that sentence and remained silent for a long time.

She carefully folded the statement and handed it back to the messenger, replying with only one sentence.

"If we don't have enough boats, we'll use kerosene to make up for it."

She looked up at the mountains of timber and tung oil barrels in the dock, her eyes showing no fear, but rather a kind of obsessive madness.

"Tell General Liu that they have many ships, but they certainly have fewer grain transport ships than warships. If I can find an opportunity to burn them once, they will starve for half a month."

The messenger dared not ask any further questions and bowed as he withdrew.

Shang Wanqing knew very well that Liu Jingshuang's judgment was correct.

Faced with a massive force of 20,000 people, his dozen or so speedboats were like a few hounds in front of a wolf pack; they could harass and bite, but they could never confront them head-on.

But war is never just about counting heads.

Liu Jingshuang was not surprised when she received Shang Wanqing's reply.

She simply instructed the Embroidered Uniform Guard to extend the area of ​​the sea they were monitoring a hundred miles further south.

She agreed with Shang Wanqing's method. To deal with a stubborn person like Ke Zhenchuan, one had to use even more ruthless and unreasonable methods.

That night, Liu Jingshuang wrote a long letter back to the capital.

The night breeze stirred the curtains of the general's tent, and the lamplight flickered.

She sat at her desk, yet the words she wrote remained steady without a single tremor.

In the letter, she described in detail the entire process of the Quanzhou beach landing, from how to predict Ke Zhenchuan's movements, to how to use the terrain to set up an ambush, and how Shang Wanqing's fast boat blocked the sea from the flank. She wrote down everything in great detail.

She then attached the chilling prisoner's confession and drew a heavy circle over the number "thirteen or fourteen thousand" with a vermilion pen.

At the end of the letter, she wrote down her judgment.

"Ke Zhenchuan hasn't deployed his main force yet, but his ambitions are considerable. This beach landing is ostensibly a test, but in reality, it's to ascertain the strength of our defenses in the southeast. I predict that when the autumn harvest is approaching and grain prices are at their highest, he will surely launch a full-scale attack."

"My 20,000 cavalrymen are sufficient to defend the coast of three provinces. However, if we wish to annihilate their main force at sea, the more ships we have, the better."

After writing, she blew the letter dry and put it into a sealing wax envelope.

As she handed the messenger to the waiting messenger outside, she suddenly called him back.

"When you return to Quanzhou Shipyard, please pass on a message from me to Shang Wanqing."

Liu Jingshuang looked at the dark sea in the distance, her voice sounding particularly clear in the night wind.

"Tell her to build the seventeenth and eighteenth fast ships for me before autumn."

She knew very well that when the next storm came, every ship that could run faster would be a piece that could decide the outcome.

But they don't have much time left.